McMahon’s fluent German comes in handy

Rep. Mike McMahon (D-N.Y.) had a special advantage over his colleagues when German Chancellor Angela Merkel dropped by Capitol Hill on Tuesday.

McMahon speaks fluent German, and it came in handy at a post-speech reception with Merkel.

McMahon said, “My father was regional governor of Bavaria during the U.S. occupation after the [Second World] War, and my mother was a secretary. They’ve been together through seven kids and almost 60 years of marriage.”

McMahon went to Germany after college and trained to be a German teacher for two years, but decided to go to law school before he got the chance to teach. 

He said his mom spoke mostly English, but added, “We definitely heard German whenever she lost her temper.”

“My mother is now in her 80s, and as she gets older, she probably speaks more German now than she used to.”

McMahon has passed on his love of the Teutonic tongue to his son. “It’s really great,” he said, “my son is at the University of Notre Dame, and he spent a year abroad in Innsbruck, Austria, and now he’s doing an internship with John Deere in Mannheim, Germany.

“Now that he speaks [German], it’s sort of a secret language between me and him, because my wife and daughter speak less than we do.”

Asked what he loves most about the language, McMahon answers energetically, “I love that it’s very exact, and the words sound just like they are spelled. There are no spelling bees in Germany, you know” — ITK did not know this — “because everything sounds exactly like it’s spelled.”